It was the kind of morning that smelled like everything ending and beginning at exactly the same time. The air was sharp and cold, the way October air is sharp and cold — not mean about it, just honest. Fionella was sitting on the old stone wall with her knees pulled up and her left ear doing that thing it does when something interesting is about to happen.
The crimp in her ear — the left one, the one that gives her away — had been tingling since before dawn. She'd woken to it, lying in the dark of the Northern Woods, listening to the trees breathe.
"Something is coming," she had thought. "Something wonderful and heavy and gold."
She was not wrong.
At precisely half past eight — she knew because the robin on the upper branch had sung his half-past-eight song — every leaf on the great oak at the edge of the clearing let go at once.
Not one by one, the way leaves usually fall. Not drifting and spinning and taking their sweet time. All at once. A single golden exhale. Three hundred thousand leaves lifting off the tree like a held breath finally released, and then falling, slow and brilliant and absolutely complete, all the way to the forest floor.
Fionella sat very still and let them fall around her.
When it was over — when the last leaf had settled and the oak stood bare and unashamed against the October sky — she heard the sound.
It was small. It came from underneath.
She climbed down from the wall — carefully, because the stones were damp — and waded through the golden drifts toward the base of the tree. The leaves smelled of cold honey and dark earth and something else she couldn't name, something ancient and very much alive.
There, beneath the deepest pile, right where the roots of the oak made a kind of cradle in the ground:
A door.
Not large. Not tall enough for a full-grown human — but then, full-grown humans weren't generally who the Northern Woods had in mind. It was just the right size for someone like Fionella, or for one of the smaller fairies, or for the particular kind of goblin who folds himself up neatly when traveling and then unfolds with a pleased expression on the other side.
The door was made of something that might have been wood, or might have been the memory of wood. It was green — not painted, just green — the color of things that have been growing quietly for a very long time.
On it, someone had carved three words:
You were expected.
Fionella sat down in the leaves and looked at the door for a long time.
Her left ear had stopped tingling.
Whatever was behind it — whatever had been waiting — it had been waiting a very long time, and it was in no hurry now. It simply waited, the way things in the Northern Woods wait: with patience, and warmth, and the absolute certainty that the right moment would come.
She reached out and put her hand on the door.
It was warm.